Money, conflict and reciprocity in rural black families in South Africa.

Abstract:

There is a rich body of literature examining multiple aspects of money in the social
sciences yet the role of money in organising and shaping family interactions in the
South African context appears limited. The aims of this research were to explore
money and its link to conflict in the family and develop an understanding of how
money is organised in and influenced by culture and gender in rural Black families in
South Africa. Ten women undergraduate students were selected, using nonprobability
snowball sampling, to participate in individual semi-structured
interviews. Detailed biographical information was collected alongside responses to
ten open ended money related questions. Interviews were transcribed and thematic
content analysis was used to identify and analyse themes in the data both within and
across the ten interviews. The research was dominated by five key findings the most
significant being a relative lack of conflict between the interviewees’ family members
in general and specifically with regard to money. This was influenced by the shared
hierarchy of priorities within the family that informs and directs the allocation of
resources. The authority of parents related to a particular set of social and cultural
norms determined familial interaction influencing the limited expression of conflict.
The presence and significance of reciprocity in the interviewees’ families was widely
accepted within an extended family structure and exhibited no striking generational
differences in adherence to the generalised norm of reciprocity. The interviewees’
families also displayed a marked lack of gendered difference in the allocation of
resources among family members. The study while achieving its goal of providing
some understanding of how money works in a particular group of rural Black families
highlights the need for further exploration of money and conflict in the family in the
South African context.